Pocket Observation: An Attention Reclamation Project Vol. 1

POCKET OBSERVATION

An Attention Reclamation Project

Volume 1

Hello. My name is Meg Conley. Iam a writer, mother and observer. My
work appears in places like Harper’s Bazaar, The Guardian, BBC and
NPR. I create one half of Pocket Observation. The other half is created
by you. I am grateful we get to be observant together.

Scan the QR code to follow along as I work through this Pocket Observa-
tion. Through that link you will find exclusive writing, audio notes, free
art, recommended resources and a PDF version of this Pocket Observa-
tion. You will also find other issues of Pocket Observation

available for download.

Not into QR codes? I get it! Just head to
https://pocketobservatory.org/pocket-observation

This book features two typefaces. Tech School by Beth Mathews and Goodchild by
Nick Shinn and Nicolas Jenson

Pocket Observation © 2025 by Meg Conley is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND
4.0.This means that you can reproduce and distribute this book as long as you give
appropriate credit. You may not use any of the material for commercial purposes.
if you remix, transform or build upon this material you may not distribute the
modified material. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.
org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

This is a Pocket Observation

Each Pocket Observation contains a curriculum designed to help you
reclaim your attention, preserve information and facilitate knowled-
ge sharing. Engage with the curriculum, but do not feel confined to
it.

This Pocket Observation can be printed at home. It requires just 4
sheets of paper. It can be bound with staples or strings. Consider
adding a decorative cover.

Pocket Observations can also be kept in a digital space. A fillable pdf
version is available via the QR code on the opposite page.

As you interact with this Pocket Observation, it will be transformed
into a piece of your personal archive. Add blank pages, write in the
margins, tape in ephemera, sketch impressions.

Records require context. This usually includes names, dates, loca-
tions. Sometimes this is not advised. For example, if youre making a
record of reproductive healthcare activism in an anti-abortion state.
Add context safely and creatively. Use pseudonyms, the time of day
instead of a date, emotional atmosphere instead of location.

Set a aside a spot for your archive - a single shelf or storage box will
do. Do not digitize records unless it is safe to do so.

Pocket Observation is made under a Creative Commons license that
allows you to redistribute this booklet for non-commercial purpo-
ses. Print a few booklets, add a handwritten message if you like and
leave them in community spaces.

Set a fixed Pocket Observation period. At the end of the observation
period, ask yourself what information you are missing. What else do
you need/want to know about the ideas you've been considering?
Include your answer in your archive.

Start a Pocket Observation Club. Gather at the end of each Observa-
tion period to share what you've observed. Exchange useful informa-
tion - book lists, how-to guides, recipes, articles, study guides.

Dear Observer,

I’ve been trying to process the future since I was a kid. If I could

just see what’s coming, I could understand how to keep my family
safe. My insides are always softly whirring, struggling to render an
accurate model of the approaching space and time. When things are
very uncertain, the whirring turns into a roar, my hands tremble, my
teeth clack.

In the months after the 2024 United States presidential election,

it felt like I might shake apart. The day the Trump administration
took down the first archives, my insides went still. I could see what’s
coming.

In my nation’s capital, a coalition of Christian Nationalists, Tech
Reactionaries and Trumpists are installing an authoritarian gover-
nment. They claim their gender, race and class gives them absolute
authority over hundreds of millions of people.

Authoritarian regimes can’t justify their claims in an informa-
tion-abundant environment. Information enclosure must precede
systemic dispossession. Authoritarians always start by pulling down
the archives, stopping the research, and banning books. I unders-
tand why others might not recognize what government erasure of
public information foretells. So many of us have been misled about
the way information functions in our lives.

As a child, my textbook timelines taught me to conflate information
with technology. The Stone Age humans battered their world into
shape with rocks. I lived during a more evolved age, humans used
information systems to engineer the world. My education trained
me to optimize information retrieval but neglected to teach me how
to detect significance. I learned information could exist apart from
people. Documents could create, maintain and defend institutions. I
was told to buy into a world where information enclosure generated
exponential growth.

I couldn’t have even if I wanted to —- others got there first. Private
interests manufactured information-scarcity in the decades before

Trump’s ascendancy. Libraries, newspapers and community spaces
were hollowed out by private equity. Higher education became the
handmaiden of financialization. Misinformation is distributed by
algorithms aligned with billionaire interest. The details of our lives
were relabeled data, a euphemism that gave corporate agents per-
mission to exploit our connections. Digital decay devours crowdsour-
ced knowledge while AI slop seeps through search. In this environ-
ment, archives exist to be erased.

And here, Dear Observer, you might think, “Yes, Meg. It is bad and
sad to lose our histories and our research and our books. But many
things are bad and sad right now. Why should I care particularly
about information-scarcity? And what can I possibly do about it?”
These are the very questions I’ve set out to answer.

First, I can tell you why information matters so desperately. And
then I can tell you one thing you can do about. I found both answers
by searching through public archives.

What happens when information is kept from us?

By the mid-twentieth century, advances in information technology
facilitated efficient knowledge sharing across communities, borders
and great distances. These interactions produced new ways to captu-
re and release energy. World powers began treating scientific disco-
very as “the most essential of warlike activities in a time of peace.”
Information was controlled, commoditized and classified.

Just a few years before his death, Albert Einstein cried out, “the field
of information unceasingly shrinks under the pressure of military
necessity.” An answer to our first question is found in the layers of
this lament.

Einstein taught us that the energy-matter content of the universe ne-
ver changes. He also said that existence depends on change — energy
transforming into matter and matter transforming into energy. These
transformations produce all the variation we see — stars, mountains,
your most beloved person. These transformations also produce all
the variation we cannot see — quarks, dark matter, the space that

once held your most beloved person.

This brings us to one of Einstein’s biggest ideas: Reality is not crea-
ted by the fundamental fact of energy and matter. Instead, reality is
created by the relationships between energy and matter. The more
relationships, the more expansive reality becomes.

Now. Imagine a field of information that grows as it encompasses
difference communities that know and ask different things. As peo-
ple interact with information, things change. These transformations
produce every piece of the human-made world — goods, social struc-
tures, your most beloved person. A large field of information means
more transformative relationships. As Einstein watched power
shrink the field of information, he understood he was watching reali-
ty shrink too.

Authoritarians must shrink the field of information so they can dimi-
nish and dominate reality. Destroying archives and banning books is
never enough because documents don’t consider meaning — commu-
nities do. Authoritarians try to use closed systems to separate people
from shared meaning. But no system containing humans can ever be
closed to information leaks. Not even the blockchain.

The human ability to detect significance and consider it within the
context of the past, present and future is species unique. Homo
Sapiens seem to have emerged alongside meaning. We have always
been Children of the Information Age.

And so, after the archives are torn apart, authoritarians destroy us
too. People, especially children, die when information scarcity is
imposed by the government. This is intentional. Each loss depletes
acommunity’s ability to process reality beyond authoritarianism’s
fragile framework.

We need to keep our world too big to be captured by their code. For
most of us, this work will manifest through small acts we perform
every day, with the skills and resources we have at hand. Every ac-
tion their program can’t easily compute is an action that drains their
power.

One of the things that can be done

As you find ways to act outside their authoritarian script, I am
asking you to include the work of preserving information and culti-
vating shared meaning. Keep records of what you know, what you
learn, what you observe. Find communities where you can give and
receive knowledge.

Mariame Kaba, activist, author and archivist, includes record kee-
ping, educational pamphlet making and community knowledge
sharing in Some Actions that Are Not Protesting or Voting. It can be
difficult to know how to do that work. That’s where Pocket Observa-
tion comes in

This Pocket Observation is the first document in a personal archive
we are each going to build. These booklets will help us preserve our
dispersed knowledge in a systematic, unhackable, accessible way.

I will post my own observations on Pocket Observatory throughout
the month. Simply scan the QR code on the title page of this booklet
to read my observations.

What will we do with the records we keep? Well, I expect they'll sit
on our shelves where we can reach for them when we need them.
Someday the archives will go back up. Maybe some Pocket Obser-
vations will end up on those shelves. But there is the hope of some-
thing more in my request.

As we keep and share meaning, we create relationships that extend
reality beyond limited men’s limited horizons. What will that reality

hold? I can’t be sure.

But I think the answer includes an epigram found in the margins of
Octavia E. Butler’s archive,

“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”

Love, Meg

With this Pocket Observation we will

1. Remember that information is our human inheritance.

2. Consider what we know and how we know it.

3. Think about the positive impact of information technology.

4. Learn what documents are and what documents can never be.

5. Understand how authoritarians use documentation technology to
obscure information + control individuals.

6. Remember why authoritarians fail.
7. Practice preserving and sharing information.

8. Practice seeking information

1. Information is our human inheritance

Information is a word we use to describe many things. Here, we
are talking about information in the sense of human experience and
human knowing.

Sensing significant developments in the environment and seeking to
influence others - becoming informed and informing others -
are basic to survival.

- Michael Buckland, Information and Society

A very simple example: Iam on a walk with my young child. We reach
across walk. I know the signifigance of Do Not Walk and Walk signals.
I also know that people driving cars do not always heed signals, Even
when a Walk signal flashes, I must look both ways for cars before cros-
sing the street. I share this information with my child. She turns that
information into knowledge. She is now able to understand and heed the
signals. She is less likely to be hit by a car, even when I cannot walk with
her.

Information cannot be separated from meaning. And meaning can-
not exist apart from human understanding.

Human knowing is not restricted to what must be understood for
basic survival. Love is a kind of information. So is hate.

Humans have a species-unique ability to consider information within
the context of the past, present and future.

Not all information is true. Humans must trust information for it to
become knowledge. Information doesn’t have to be true to lead to
knowledge or belief.

We trust information that comes from trusted people, communities
and institutions. Trust is a reciprocal relationship that requires cons-
tant nurturing.

2. What we know and how we know it
Knowledge is not the same thing as information.

Only an individual can know something. When that individual dies,
their knowing dies with them. Information can survive in other
members of their community. And so what was known by one per-
son can be known by many others.

What each of us knows is a significant component of our culture.
Our knowledge, modes of communication and ways of reasoning
are culturally situated in our personal small world,

and even the smallest personal world is complex.

- Michael Buckland, Information and Society

Every society is made up of many different communities. And every
individual belongs to many different communities. Different com-
munities know different things.

For example: People who belong to the American Chestnut Foundation
know how to identify an American Chestnut. Southern Californians
know about the Santa Ana winds. Elementary school children know
where to line up after recess. A family knows their matriarch makes the
best pecan pie in the world.

What a community knows or believes has consequences for people
inside and outside of the community.

3. Information technology diminishes the effects of space and time.

Writing, copying and printing are kinds of information technology.
Writing down what we know, copying what others have written
down, printing many copies of one document - these are all techno-
logical innovations that make it possible to share and protect infor-
mation.

4. Documents are not information
Documents are the cultural objects that signify meaning.

An object is only a document if it is perceived as signifying some-
thing.

Suzanne Briet,* a pioneer of information science, said that anything
can serve as a document as long as it conveys meaning.

A piece of paper with text is a document, a mother’s raised eyebrow is
a document, a uniform is a document, a Pocket Observation is a docu-
ment, a cave wall covered in neolithic art is a document, a salute is a
document, a computer program is a document, a Do Not Walk sign is a
document.

All societies are information societies. Societies become dependent
on documents as the division of labor becomes more complex.
Trusted documents stand-in for first-hand knowledge.

A very simple example: My family does not grow our own food. We buy
our food from grocery stores and markets.I am not present at the harvest,
processing, or shipping of any of that food. My oldest daughter is allergic
to nuts. We depend on ingredient labels - documents - to make sure the
food we purchase is nut-free. I trust the ingredient labels because I know
that my country has a federal agency that regulates and enforces food
labeling.

An object cannot be a document if it does not convey meaning to a
person.

Documents cannot be separated from human understanding. (No
matter what the LLM maximalists say!)

Documents can only be indirect and imperfect records of human
knowing and experience because “documents are not people.”

*Suzanne Briet was known as Madame Documentation. She earned the title.

5. The authoritarians are trying to use documents against us

Understanding what is known in a community is necessary to pre-
dict how the community will react, adapt and adopt. There is an
incentive to find out what is known in a community. And the ability
to influence a community is a source of serious power.

Increasingly, there is a shift from individuals deriving benefits from
the use of documents to documentary regimes seeking to influence,
control and benefit from individuals.

- Michael Buckland, Information and Society

Social media platforms like Instagram are proto-documentary re-
gimes. Posts, likes, and comments are all documents. Those docu-
ments are collected into data sets. Those data sets are anaylzed to
discover what is known in a community. Algorithms, another type of
document, are used to influence what is known in a community.

Authoritarians want to use documentation technology to impose
tech-enabled feudalism. They want to use property tech and internet
surveillance to document all of our behavior. They want to use LLMs
to process those documents to learn everything we know. They want
to use AI slop to obscure information. They want to use single-sour-
ce of truth aggregation to change what we know. They want to force
our economic and legal systems onto the blockchain so they can
distibute subjuguation.

The authoritarians think they can use documents to understand
and to control us because they think humans are like large language
models. They think they can train us on data sets and use prompt
engineering to refine our responses.

6. The authoritarians will fail

People are not machines. The authoritarian program cannot process
the human experience. It cannot compute love, laughter, grief, joy
and hope. It does not comprehend care work. It can’t fathom memo-
ries or visions. It can’t capture the meaning of a family recipe, a rock
collection, an inside joke. Preserving humane information and fos-
tering shared meaning is one way to exhaust authoritarian power.

7. Practice preserving and sharing information
Use the lined pages at the back of the booklet to respond to these prompts

Different communities know different things. Think about one of
your communities. What is something you know because of your
membership in that community? Who else in the community knows
what you know?

Make an (incomplete!) list of objects that serve as documents in your
life. What does the object mean to you? Does it signify that same
meaning to others?

We are living in a time when the field of information unceasingly
shrinks under the pressure of those interested in domination. Survey
the field of information from a local perspective - what information is
being made scarce in your community?

Allow yourself to imagine living under a new sun. What information
would have to be accessible for that new sun to exist? How can you
start preserving and sharing that information now?

8. Practice seeking information

Checking out books from your local library is a great way to help
maintain an expansive information field. Make a list of books youd
like to read this year.

Engage with community archives in your region. How can you
support them?

Choose a topic you'd like to know more about - gardening, astro-
nomy, mutual aid, miniatures, anything! Find ways to learn about
the topic in a community setting. Not sure where to begin? Go to
your local library or community college and ask about upcoming
workshops.

When we preserve and share information,
we expand our means of creation.

Observations

Observations

There is
nothing
new
under
the sun,
but, there